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Missionaries of Hope

Last Sunday I was at Parel, climbing up the steep staircase of a dingy little building to inaugurate a tiny new NGO initiative. Disha.

Disha is actually a new extension of an 85-year-old initiative called the Social Service League which runs a charming little campus right in the heart of what still remains Mumbai's largest industrial labour district. The campus, which started in the first decade of this century, has several buildings where young people are taught two things.

One: How to enhance their most basic skills and deploy them in a manner that can improve their earnings in whatever job they do.

Two: The importance of social service work and how, apart from doing good for the community, it can actually provide a means of livelihood for young people who enjoy the excitement of adding value to the environment in which they live. Dr Ambedkar, I was told, spent weeks on this campus, teaching the students. So did many other famous people during the years of the freedom struggle.

Disha is not an ambitious venture by any stretch of imagination. It has started with a small donation of Rs 31,000 by a local businessman to buy hospital equipment like bed pans, walkers, stretchers, wheel chairs. These will be loaned out to poor families who have patients returning from hospital and cannot afford adequate care during the convalescing period. Once the patient recovers, the equipment can be returned to Disha so that another needy person from the community can use it. This helps underprivileged families to borrow expensive equipment that they would have been, otherwise, forced to buy. Or do without. A simple idea that will go a very long way towards helping the poorer families in Parel meet the high cost of post-hospitalisation care.

Dr Ketayun Dinshaw who runs Tata Memorial, India's most reputed cancer hospital, which is also based in Parel, was there with me at the inauguration. She and others told me how there are hundreds of such tiny NGO initiatives all over Parel. NGOs that you and I would have never heard of, doing amazing work that touches the lives of hundreds of families, thousands of patients. Many of them terminally sick.

There are NGOs that raise funds to finance hospitalisation of the poor. NGOs that organise blood donations, persuade doctors to operate free on poor patients, offer artificial limbs to those who cannot afford it. NGOs that support families where the bread earner is hospitalised for a long spell, jeopardising the future of the entire family.

There are NGOs that cook dal, roti, sabzi and distribute it free among poor patients and their relatives in the hospital and also among those who cannot get a bed there and lie outside for days, waiting for accommodation. There are NGOs who collect money to buy second class railway tickets for patients and their families to return home after treatment. Or to come back, after a few months, for follow up treatment. There are NGOs who send in young people after school and college hours to read to patients from old books and newspapers that another NGO collects from slightly better off homes.

One NGO offers free tutorial service to sick and poor students while another uses the hospitalisation time to teach young women how to sew and knit and enhance their house keeping skills. A high profile NGO, instead of commiserating with the victims of cancer, goes one step ahead and celebrates the victors. Those who have fought back the dreaded disease and won. Their lives and stories become beacons of hope for the rest who are traumatised by horror stories about the Big C. The NGO is spearheaded by a group of remarkable men and women who have won the war against cancer themselves.

I have heard of many other NGOs in Parel. Some of them work for adult literacy. Others for family planning. Still others for street children. Some go from home to home, teaching women basic skills in coping with domestic chores. Others fight alcoholism, violence at home, drugs. The more fashionable ones promote AIDS awareness. But what impresses me most are the humblest ones. Ones that, for example, provide accommodation and care to those poor patients who come from remote villages and have nowhere to stay. The families that put them up are equally poor, equally helpless and yet they are ready to forget their own problems and look after complete strangers in their one-room chawls and nurse them back to health. Without charging a sou.

This is Parel. The home of Mumbai's industrial poor. Where the textile industry died when Datta Samant over reached himself and, in the process, destroyed the homes and lives of thousands of mill workers. This is Parel where the home-grown mafiosi recruits its reckless errand boys. Unemployed youngsters who have watched their middle class families slowly slide into penury, who refuse to bear the cross of pain and suffering any more, who refuse to go back to their villages. Who want money, opportunities, a new lease of life at any cost. If this means joining the criminal underworld, they are ready for that as well.

Yet at the heart of all this poverty lies a clear understanding of what life is all about. There is concern, care, love and affection for one's fellow beings. There is the desire to help each other, uplift each other's destiny, add value to the environment in which they live and dream. They still throw up selfless teachers, committed social workers, young boys and girls full of hope who are ready to participate in the process of nation building. The fact that they are poor does not hold them back. The fact that the City of Gold does not offer them equal opportunities does not make them despair.

For me, it was a humbling experience. To watch and listen to the people there, to experience the warmth and love they share for each other in a city that is reputed for its soulless entrepreneurship, its cut throat competitiveness, its callousness towards those who fail.

For all those who say that Mumbai is wicked, mean, violent like Dick Whittington's London, I say: Watch these NGOs, see their growing numbers, see the millions of lives that are touched by their efforts. Where divine intervention fails, human effort takes over. Where religion fails, these missionaries of hope move in. They are slowly, imperceptibly transforming our lives, our society. What they need is your support and the support of the government because they are doing what the State should have been doing in the first place. Instead it wastes over Rs 170,000 crore in subsidies that help no one and, instead, impoverish India.

If these efforts fail, we will all pay the price. There will be less hope in the hearts of the young; more crime on the streets, more hate and violence and bigotry, more desperation; more loneliness for those who are old and ailing; more pain, more anguish, more hurt. If you think you can escape it just because you are better off, forget it. Your wealth, your status, your caste, your special privileges, nothing can protect you. Not even the high walls you have built around your sprawling bungalow or the six armed guards who are paid a small fortune to look after your security or that fancy bit of technology which shows you who is standing outside your door and ringing the bell.

In fact, do not even ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you.

Pritish Nandy

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